"The HelenOS project is an effort to develop a complete and usable modern operating system, yet offering room for experimenting and research. HelenOS uses its own microkernel written from scratch and supports SMP, multitasking and multithreading on both 32-bit and 64-bit, little-endian and big-endian processor architectures, among wich are AMD64/EM64T (x86-64), ARM, IA-32, IA-64 (Itanium), 32-bit MIPS, 32-bit PowerPC, SPARC V9 and Xen 3.0. Thanks to the relatively high number of supported architectures and suitable design, HelenOS is extremely-well portable."
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Member since:2005-07-06
well it works fine by my experience.
and there seems to be a good deal of the real-time stuff, that i guess is used on such a device, is being moved to the main kernel tree.
remember, while there is a lot of stuff in the kernel, you can turn on and of what will be compiled depending on your need.
so its not like you hit compile and its the same kernel that pops out each and every time.
i would hazard a guess that its more that the same in say the windows kernel between xp and 2003 then what is different. the only place where mircosoft seems to have gone radical is on the wince/pocketpc os...
and one can question why.
Member since:2007-05-19
Yes you can configure things in the kernel. But the problem is that the amount of irrelevant things you deal with almost outweigh the relevant things for an embedded platform. For example, the linux virtual memory subsystem, the ide subsystem, etc. are hard to grasp. But I bet, you can write a slab+buddy or similar allocator for your need in a few thousand lines of code. Same goes for disk support, filesystems, (almost only relevant flash filesystem nowadays is LogFS = ~1000 loc) etc. So the conclusion is embedded linux support is good, but given all the effort and complexity it might be worth starting from scratch. ;-)
Member since:
2007-05-19
The specifics is that linux is micro-optimised for servers. Yes it supports a lot of embedded architectures but rather half-heartedly. There's nothing wrong with that, and I doubt any other existing open source OS can do any better than linux. But I think molding PC or server OS'es for embedded systems doesn't work very well.